Victoria’s Secret is not just her Underwear

                Tonight the Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show is televised on a major network and that makes me so sad.  I am sad for the women of the world and especially little girls.  I am also sad for men nobody expects anything from you and you shrug and admit you are a proud stereotype with no desire for integrity or heroism.  The race to the bottom picks up velocity because of shows such as the Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show.

                The Girl Scout Research Institute (GSRI) put out finding of a study they had done in which 1141 girls’ age 11 through 17 were asked about reality television and their resulting perceptions.  Girls who watched these shows rated the importance of appearance higher than those who did not.  78% who watched thought gossip was normal in female relationships as opposed to 54% who were not frequent watchers.  68% of those girls surveyed believed it was “in girls’ nature to be catty and competitive” compared with 50% of those who were not regular viewers.  63% of watchers found it difficult to trust other girls as opposed to 50% of non-viewers.

                I bring this study up to highlight how impressionable our girls are.  In a different study by GSRI entitled, “The New Normal?  What Girls Say about Healthy Living, 2006, 1/3 of girls 8 to 17 have a disordered idea about their weight and “23% of girls say they do not participate in sports because they do not think their bodies look good.”

                So those who believe that this show is a positive expression of encouragement to girls really have not dug into the figures to support their views; because the figures do not support those views.  Just the opposite in fact the impression left on girls who need exercise is I am too fat to get involved and the message sent to girls who do not need to lose weight is this is an appropriate way to get attention. 

The other side of the coin is the male side; men allow themselves to be further convinced that the objectification of women is an appropriate and wanted form of interaction.  So we see a synergy of dysfunction emerge; women and girls seeking attention inappropriately and men giving them attention which is inappropriate.

The resulting depression and heartache is then placed at the feet of the “morality bigots” of the world, because we make things so repressive, instead of shows such as the Victoria Secret Fashion Show.  I pray we see through the smokescreens and defend women and especially girls who deserve a healthy and loving future.

Penn. State vs. the Catholic Church

I saw this headline on the television in the lobby as I was passing through, “Penn. State vs. the Catholic church”.  CNN was asking someone how compatible the comparisons are and then they made a blanket statement like, “They both covered up abuse because they were afraid of the consequences if the abuse came out.”  O.K. that’s one theory, I believe the story is a lot more nuanced than that.

                In the Penn. State case you have an eye witness whose gut check failed him and that failure went all the way up the ladder to Joe Paterno; in the case of the Catholic Church the Bishops received advice from the world of psychology. 

                It is a different time than that of the Church’s scandal, which peaked in the mid-60s through mid-80s, there are not a lot of psychologists seriously advising that a pedophile could or should be rehabilitated.  This was not the case as the Church looked for direction; the direction they received included isolating the pedophile from children and counseling for the offender.  These techniques have since been discredited, largely because predators find victims regardless of attempts to isolate them.

                The Catholic Church had 6 credible allegations of sexual abuse in 2009, this number  was down 36% from 2008, keep in mind that these are 6 allegations against over 40,000 priests and tens of thousands of individuals working for the Catholic Church.  You will not hear that reported in the media.

                33% of girls and 16% of boys are sexually abused before the age of eighteen, not by priests but by the population at large. In the abuse of girls 29% were relatives and 60% were acquaintances and in boys 16% were family members and 44% were acquaintances.  When one compares statistics the unfortunate reality is that the Catholic Church can not only take the “Pepsi Challenge” with any other institution but also against most extended families.  Since the vast majority of perpetrators against children are men which highlights the fact that the Catholic Church has become more effective at choosing quality men than women have.

                The difference is that the Church has become more insistent on the universal application of its teachings.  The sexual abusers in the Church preyed on the willed confusion by some after the Second Vatican Council as they drew from secular and worldly influences and many times saw their victimization as an expression of their liberal Catholic politics.  Women from the time of Eve, or Lilith if one buys into all that, have been wooed by secular and worldly influence.  Ever wonder why housewives are so desperate?  It has a lot to do with the promise made between the friends of “Sex in the City”, to “have sex like men”.  The unintended consequences of this leaves their children unguarded against the men they parade through their children’s lives, which is a consequence of imploding families and easy divorce as marriage has as little consequence as sex.

                To determine if the “Laissez fare” attitude toward sex and marriage is actually feminist or not one should note which sex is most viscerally hurt through its application over time.  Women and children are far more, of course, the ones who bear the brunt of the impact of the policy of no fault sex and marriage.  The arguments against a healthy respect of sex, marriage, and family are largely academic and so extremely intellectual, my apologies for the sarcasm, that it leads us back to the campus of Penn. State.  The following was lifted from the comments section of the National Catholic Register online from an article entitled “Penn State and the Church”.  I left it as is so as not to assume any credit as it does hit the nail on the head.

                “In March 2002, when Jerry Sandusky was abusing and molesting young boys, Penn State sponsored and hosted a Conference on Women’s Health and Wellness.  Like many virtuous sounding names, e.g., The Second Mile Foundation, the true nature is far more sinister.  Patrick Califia-Rice was the keynote speaker at Penn State’s Conference on Women’s Health and Wellness.  Califia-Rice is an outspoken advocate of pedophilia and sadomasochism.  She (apparently used to be a “he”) wrote books such as “Macho Sluts” and “Public Sex: The Culture of Radical Sex”.  Most relevant to the exposure of sex abuse at Penn State is Califia-Rice’s philosophy, which, according to World Net Daily, NAMBLA posts on its website.  Here is what the Keynote speaker at Penn State’s Conference believes.
“Boy-lovers and the lesbians who have young lovers are the
only people offering a hand to help young women and men
cross the difficult terrain between straight society and the
gay community.  They are not child molesters.  The child
abusers are priests, teachers, therapists, cops and parents
who force their stale morality onto the young people in
their custody.  Instead of condemning pedophiles for their
involvement with lesbian and gay youth, we should be
supporting them.”
Califia-Rice was the keynote speaker at this Penn State Conference during the tenure of Penn State President Graham Spanier.  Last week, of course, the Penn State Board of Trustees fired Spanier.  Shockingly, this Conference was not an isolated event on President Spanier’s watch.  To the contrary, it appears as if part of Penn State’s mission during President Spanier’s tenure was to promote and encourage all manner of depravity and immorality in the name of academic freedom and free speech.  In Feb. 2001, Penn State’s Womyn’s Concerns hosted a “Sex Faire”.  This taxpayer funded event included games such as “pin the clitoris on the vulva” and “orgasmo bingo”.  It also included a “Tent of Consent” where students were allowed to engage in any behavior they desired.  World Net Daily reports other events.
At this time, then Pennsylvania State Representative John Lawless tried to stop these sort of events at Penn State.  Not surprisingly, Rep. Lawless objected to Pennsylvania taxpayers funding such events.  The Pennsylvania House Appropriations Committee held a hearing.  At the hearing, Penn State President Graham Spanier said he would not stop such events because Penn State was committed to free speech.  When asked if the programs were wrong or immoral, Spanier said “It depends on what your definition of immoral is.” 
In the end, Rep. Lawless sadly reported that “You can’t touch Penn State.  * * * Football is more important than education and morals.” 
Put simply, Penn State supported and sponsored the exact activities that the university now says it finds objectionable and repulsive.  President Spanier once testified that those activities were protected free speech.  The university’s current about-face is not credible.” 


Read more: http://www.ncregister.com/daily-news/penn-state-and-the-church?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+NCRegisterDailyBlog+National+Catholic+Register#When:2011-11-13#ixzz1drLZXouY

                30% of molested children will molest their own children, 80% of 21 year olds who were molested as children meet criteria for some form of mental illness, 14% of men and 36% of women in prison were abused as children, and abused girls are 25% more likely to experience teen pregnancy so the “help” which the child molester offers is inconceivably misplaced and unwanted by the abused child and society at large.  This is the humble opinion of this Catholic, who will not walk away from any situation of abuse but jump into the shower and right down the throat of the perpetrator, period.

North Carolina vs. Mississippi

Today Mississippi votes on a “personhood” amendment.  Yesterday victims of a sterilization program in North Carolina spoke out on “Rock Center with Brian Williams”.  These two articles strike me as: one) they are both about reproductive rights, but two) they are also both about “personhood”.

                “North Carolina was one of 31 states to have a government run eugenics program.  By the 1960s, tens of thousands of Americans were sterilized as a result of these programs. 

Eugenics was a scientific theory that grew in popularity during the 1920s.  Eugenicists believed that poverty, promiscuity and alcoholism were traits that were inherited.  To eliminate those society ills and improve society’s gene pool, proponents of the theory argued that those that exhibited the traits should be sterilized.  Some of America’s wealthiest citizens of the time were eugenicists including Dr. Clarence Gamble of the Procter and Gamble fortune and James Hanes of the hosiery company.  Hanes helped found the Human Betterment League which promoted the cause of eugenicists. 

It began as a way to control welfare spending on poor white women and men, but over time, North Carolina shifted focus, targeting more women and more blacks than whites.  A third of the sterilizations performed in North Carolina were done on girls under the age of 18.  Some were as young as nine years old."

For the past eight years, North Carolina lawmakers have been working to find a way to compensate those involuntarily sterilized in the state between 1929 and 1974. During that time period, 7,600 people were sterilized in North Carolina.  Of those who were sterilized, 85 percent of the victims were female and 40 percent were non-white.”  (Rock Center, 7/11/11)

                So what we have here is classic victimization.  Women and minorities bore the brunt of the forced sterilizations, although anyone deemed “undesirable” would have fallen under the “guidance” of the governmental program.  Suffice it to say none of the victims would have been the daughters of industrial or governmental officials, they were the wheat which meads out the judgment to the chaff.

                It reminds me of abortion.  “How pray tell is that?”  The answer is obvious; the baby will drain the parent’s resources, the baby is unwanted, the baby is a psychological hardship, the baby will cause the mother to suffer physically, the baby is just like a good for nothing so and so that drains our society of all its goodness, like someone who would qualify for the eugenics program in North Carolina in the 1960’s.

                The baby is not a result of miraculous conception.  The baby is a result of two people having sex, unless it was conceived using In Vitro Fertilization which is also a eugenic process.  People who are pro-choice should be pro-choice and recognize that 99% of the pregnancies aborted are simply incredibly cruel forms of birth control.   Abortion is not actually pro-choice at all but an attempt to invalidate a choice; just as the powers that be seek to invalidate the lives of the victims of forced sterilization.

                To sterilize a person is to extinguish that person from the infinity of time.  I believe it is in the Midrash of the Jewish faith in which it is explained that to kill a person is not only to kill that individual but also all the persons of his or her lineage and so it is an incredibly grave matter, in other words every murderer is a serial killer with an infinite number of victims over an infinite number of lost generations.  The state has tried to erase that person who was sterilized from the fabric of time.  A mother who terminates her otherwise viable pregnancy faces the same reality; do you see how sick abortion is?  It erases a son or daughter out of time for all eternity.

                If one does not believe in the personhood of the baby in the womb then forced sterilization is a victimless crime.  For what is taken from the individual but their fertility and fertility only means one thing, a womb will never grow money.  What has been taken, as Governor Perdue also states, is more valuable than money it is our children.   

  

One man, one woman, one marriage, zero bigots?

                Oh, to have it all to do over!  I was about a year into my Catholic adventure and I was in an Ethics class at Regis.  I allowed myself to be silenced.  I was too timid to speak out against the conventional wisdom “They are just in love!  What’s wrong with that?”  What indeed?  Let’s take a sober look at truths so simple we take them for granted; that marriage must be between a man and a woman.  I can say this without hatred and thus sans bigotry, just saying sheesh.

                What is love?  What is marriage and why?  People assume so much of marriage; that it’s only a social matter involving visiting our loved ones in the hospital and receiving their benefits or their property.  I say, “Stuff the benefits!” and I would still marry Melissa again tomorrow.

                Marriage is a sacrament, only in the Catholic Church incidentally, but that only makes me more sure of the veracity of the Catholic faith.  A sacrament is an outer sign of an inner reality.  “That is why a man leaves his father and mother and is joined to his wife; that they shall be made one flesh.”  Jesus quotes Genesis 2:24, as recorded in Matthew 19:5 and Mark 10:7, as He spoke of marriage and our bodies bare out the expression of that spiritual reality.  For just as man and women fit together “like puzzle pieces from the clay” (Iron and Wine, from the song “Such Great Heights”) so too do our souls, bonding us mystically together in a love like that of the Trinity.  So too is that love fertile, like the Trinitarian model, children being the result through the will of God.  If a man and a woman are infertile they must still be open to the possibility that children may one day arrive regardless of what anyone says to the contrary. 

                This openness to the possibility of life shields the couple from the temptation that one would simply use the other expressly for sex, thus depriving them of their human dignity and turning them into a vessel of self-serving pleasure.  This is one example of what’s wrong with pornography, this is also an example of what’s wrong with contraception, and this is what’s wrong with homosexuality too.  There I said it homosexuality is disordered, like contraception though so if you are gay and some Christian is giving you a hard time ask them if they use contraceptives.  These two are morally similar, except contraceptives which are abortive are far worse, and most Christians are just like the rest of culture so most use contraception.  Sex is given meaning and dignity in marriage rather than trying to find our meaning by a sexual act.

                So many people try to define themselves as “sexual beings”; they beg to be used to attain some sort of self esteem.  It creates a perversion of personality with sex, sexual attraction, superficial “sexy” fashion, and an overall compression of human existence into a Pandora’s Box of mischaracterized self-worth.  When one runs up against the many limitations of this life style the answer must be, “I need to be sexier.”  One comes to this conclusion easier it seems than a more rudimentary answer that, “I am not my sexuality!” there is no such thing as a “sexual being”.  One is so much more than who one can possess in some infinitesimally small manner.

                We are saved by our ability to give and not by what we are able to receive.  We can never receive enough of what we think we need in order to be whole, for the more we seem to get the more we realize how much more there is which we lack, and so instead of filling a hole we dig one.  We can only start to give of ourselves and that is where we find God.  Marriages, and their resulting families, are made for this smelting furnace of human transformation.

                These couples who live according to Church teaching are attempting to live in God’s will and learning to forsake their own.  To choose to do God’s will is obviously basic Christianity; to do God’s will over our own is to love God and trust in His love of us.  This is an expression of intimacy, to do the others will over your own because of love; anything else is simply playing at intimacy.

                This intimacy, this opening of hearts, creates the seedbed in which the seed of children flourish.  To create a family through this model is to create support and strength.  This is the purpose of marriage to create human flourishing into future generations.  The purpose of marriage is to draw us out of ourselves and into our most loving relationships. These are object lessons into the mystery of Trinitarian love and the very heart of the Christian faith.

                Can a homosexual marriage cause human flourishing?  Gay couples say yes, children of homosexual couples generally say yes.  There is a fundamental issue with the homosexual experience however it is that sex, sexual orientation, and gender, are up in the air but also at the very center of the parental understanding of “self”. 

                So what we have are ideas basic to identity, though not exclusive to identity, which are both fluid and central.  I have encountered parents of this parenting style who say “I am here to love and support my child in any of their decisions.”  They say this though they are speaking of toddlers.  The problem with this approach is that the hardest part of loving children is guiding them, this is called parenting.   

                Parenting effectively is the best way to minimize the skyrocketing trend of sociopathic behavior.  Narcissism is no longer a psychologically applicable diagnosis due to its flourishing in the culture at large.  Children need firm boundaries and self awareness in order to cultivate empathy.  It’s good for children to be in touch with how they feel; but that is not the extent of their ability to feel, unless they are not parented.

                This is not necessarily or exclusively a homosexual parenting problem, but in a household which would seem to cherish a child’s personal expression and introspection over and above providing definitive structure and traditional morays which sets that child up to be lost and ungrounded.

                Many homosexual couples wish to create a child with as much of their own biological information as possible; this inevitably means IVF, In Vitro fertilization.  This is going to offend some, but IVF is not a moral way to have children.  The first issue is that people simply believe they are entitled to children simply because they desire them.  This trend is indicative of the narcissistic and sociopathic tendencies of the culture at large.  We are out of touch with nature but very much in touch with what is commercially expedient.

                Our pride is not the most morally objectionable reason to be opposed to IVF; the big reason is that it is eugenics in action.  The created embryos are separated into tiers of perceived genetic value and all but the top tier is flushed or washed down the drain.  These are all not just genetic material we can do with what we will but outside the lab in a natural environment these are our sons and daughters.  The cry will go up “not until they implant” but even before they implant these embryos are communicating chemically saying “I am here.  I am on my way.”  To which the body of the mother responds with activity which welcomes that new life.  There is in nature a precursory chemical bond of communication well before a baby finds its home in its mother’s womb.

                In an essay entitled “Gay Rights” by Martha Nussbaum she states that homosexual households have “a more equal division of labor”.  This argument makes parity a virtue and totally discredits the importance that the sexes must adapt to in one’s spouse.  Mothers and fathers have different strengths and weaknesses.  This is not effectively countered by saying one partner is more masculine or feminine in their approach.  This is ridiculous because they actually aren’t; what is advanced instead is simply the construct they have made to mask the short coming they perceive in their personality and the opposite sex should be offended by the caricature.  There are actual differences between sexes.  These should be seen as strengths in the relationship not an invitation to unequal division of labor.

                Relationships between a man and a woman are intended to be places of giving and growth because we have such differences as sexes.  Men believe they know what men need; men believe men need license to do what they want.  Dan Savage has called for open sexual relationships; Mr. Savage asserts that the idea of men being faithful is not natural.  He thinks marriage is a construct which keeps women submissive and directly under the thumb of their men and they would be much better off under the insecurity of an open sexual relationship in marriage.

                What men truly need is not the license to have open sexual relationships!  What men need is to learn to be devoted and dedicated husbands and fathers!  Studies I’ve read have always confirmed that women and children are much more at risk outside of stable marriages.  Men can be taught to be nobler beasts but not without a structure which makes them grow up.  If men are given license in the most sacred area of the relationship license for the rest of it is just assumed.  The resulting man-boy would have a free reign of terror over the household and the very man Dan Savage rails against would be created, a real misogynist.

                Take Titanic for instance, women and children first except for the type of man no man should want to be, the man who places himself above everyone else and places himself pompously in the life raft amid the women and children and any other scoundrels.  Real men die for their love and they die for what’s honorable and what’s noble; they will die for their families.  They follow the example of Christ, but not out of their fallen human nature but because that Christ-like love has taught them discipline and respect and their love of the sacraments have given them the chances and grace needed on their journey to imitate Christ for the sake of their families.

                Children are always blessings; parents however are not.  The basis for what is good and true is not simply whatever is good for “me”.  The basis for what is good brings us out of our own self-interest.  This truth excludes some paths out of hand.  Homosexual marriage falls under this category.